Newspaper paywalls would be a ratings hit for local TV stations


richardboehne.jpgNice interview with E.W. Scripps CEO Richard Boehne over at TVNewsCheck, but I hate it when they call the company I work for “venerable.” Sounds so very musty.

Some selected quotes, but read the whole thing:

On online as a business:

There’s a reasonable amount of potential and it’s the same for the TV stations. TV stations have every bit the opportunity that the newspapers have and some would argue they have a better opportunity. Thus far, they have not taken advantage of that and in many markets they’re well behind the newspapers. But they’re catching up.

As strange as it sounds, we are focusing more and more on print and online as separate businesses and not the same.


On paywalls:

Newspapers terribly underestimate the ability of TV stations to produce content outside of their core audience. If newspapers attempt to take a lot of their local content and put it behind pay walls, I have no doubt that TV stations will rush in and fill the void. Now, I know we would certainly do that in all of our TV markets. So that just changed the equation a lot and the newspaper industry just for some reason overlooks the ability and determination that a lot of TV stations have.

On TV news:

We’re also just spending a lot of time looking at local TV news and just saying that right now it suffers from a plague of sameness. How do you break from that pack? How do you broaden the audience? How do you sort of reimagine and reinvent and think again about what local news should look like?

(Photo above by J. Knight in Westword.)

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